Autobayng News Team
The consumer electric vehicle market is in a bit of a mood right now. With the absence of the EV tax credit, automakers are predicting a market-wide slowdown over the next few quarters, and that puts brands in a weird limbo where executives expect the electric vehicle segment to stagnate despite the billions of dollars in recent investments.
But there’s one market that automakers seem to be ignoring: the commercial one. It might seem obvious, but business-to-business sales aren’t exactly paying the bills like the consumer auto market. They could be, though, and that’s what one former General Motors executive is betting big on.
Welcome back to Critical Materials, your daily roundup for all things electric and tech in the automotive space. Also on deck: Nvidia is giving everyone the tools needed to build self-driving cars and Americans have had it with high car prices. Let’s jump in.
30%: Automakers Are Retreating From Consumer EVs, But The Commercial Market Is Begging For Them
ZMD Truck Render
Photo by: ZMD
Former General Motors executive Dave Stenson believes that automakers are going about this perceived EV slowdown all wrong. While the big three in Detroit are seemingly leading a pullback in all things electric, Stenson is instead throwing his John DeLorean card onto the table and betting that his new startup has unlocked the secret to the next stage of electrification.
Stenson knows the drill—after all, he spent three decades in Detroit working through the algorithm of high-margin, high-volume consumer sales. Sell crossovers to suburbanites and the F-150s of the world. But when the government unstacks the deck and EVs no longer have a competitive edge, what can automakers do to ensure their new powertrains stay competitive?
Enter ZMD Motors, a startup that believes mainstream automakers have misjudged the timeline and approach to electrification. Essentially, ZMD is aiming to break the mold by moving into the medium-duty truck market. Stenson and ZMD see these platformed vehicles are the next big thing in the EV space.
Here’s what Stenson revealed in an interview with Automotive News:
Stenson’s ultimate goal is to fill an untapped niche: the electrified Class 5 work truck category, to which the Ford F-550, Ram 5500 and Silverado 5500 belong. It’s been untapped for a reason, though. Automakers focused on light-duty, high-volume EVs first. Heavy-duty electrification poses unique challenges — range limitation being high on the list — with even less certain ROI prospects than light-duty electrics.
[…] The opportunity might be tough to see from Detroit, but in California, the business case is clear, Stenson said in an interview with Automotive News affiliate Crain’s Detroit Business.
“Nobody has brought a pickup cab-based, medium-duty EV to market,” Stenson said. “Whether it’s diesel or gas, you go out to California, and they don’t want either. They want electric where it fits their work needs.”
I know that you’re just begging to hear about the next company that promises what might as well be vaporware. But ZMD’s approach could just be the missing link in EV adoption.
See, the commercial segment of the auto industry is a completely different beast from passenger cars. Government, utility companies, construction firms and the like aren’t shopping for the next big thing or a screen the size of a small TV. These consumers just want consistency and practicality, which gives brands an opportunity to focus on the tech and execution that can not only sustain a vehicle program but also build tech that will flow into the passenger car market in the future.
ZMD’s truck-sized holes are the Class 5 work trucks. This opportunity represents an annual volume output of around 80,000 units. That’s hardly an earth-shattering figure—GM sold nearly double that in passenger EVs through Q3 so far this year. But it is the perfect volume for a small startup that is eyeing up trucks with an ideal operating radius of less than 100 miles.
California in particular, is basically a goldmine in the waiting:
Electric medium-duty truck is a segment in high demand in California ZMD’s focus is on utility bucket trucks, municipal service trucks and the like, which make up a small but growing piece of the medium-duty niche. In California, there is huge demand for the product segment, said Daryl Trueblood, general manager at North Highland, Calif.-based vehicle upfitter One Stop Truck & Equipment.
Stenson’s pitch is for automakers to supply the cab and chassis, then let ZMD do the rest. This lets both companies take a foothold in the Class 5 market while also supplying companies with a product that they so desperately want.
Will it work? Maybe. But what’s keeping automakers from simply pivoting and copying ZMD’s homework?
60%: Nvidia Gives Everyone The Brain Behind Self-Driving Cars
Nvidia Lidar
Photo by: nvidia
Nvidia has decided that if the world insists on building self-driving cars, it might as well give everyone a brain smart enough to handle the task.
The company officially released its newest self-driving model, Alpamayo-R1, this week. Nvidia is pitching it as the Rosetta Stone of robot driving that uses natural language to describe exactly what it sees and then acts on that description accordingly. Reuters explains:
On Monday, Nvidia released Alpamayo-R1 for self-driving vehicles. The software is what is known as a “vision-language-action” AI model, which means that the self-driving vehicle translates what its sensor banks see on the road into a description using natural language. […]
For example, if the car sees a bike path, it will note that it sees the path and is adjusting course.
This seems like a basic problem to solve, but one of the biggest problems that engineers have reiterated time and time again is how difficult it can be to understand how self-driving models make the decisions they do. But with a model that describes its reasoning in an easy-to-understand natural language, that black box problem is less and less of a concern.
Most previous self-driving car software was limited in how it explained why the car chose a particular path, making it hard for engineers to understand what needed to be fixed to make the cars safer.
“One of the entire motivations behind making this open is so that developers and researchers can… understand how these models work so we can, as an industry, come up with standard ways of evaluating how they work,” Katie Young, senior marketing manager for the automotive enterprise at Nvidia, told Reuters.
Nvidia says that the dataset has a total of 1,727 hours of recorded driving over 310,895 clips (each one about 20 seconds long). It isn’t just perfect road conditions, either. The company says that it captured “diverse traffic, weather conditions, obstacles and pedestrians” in the model and also blends multi-camera and lidar for about half of the clips while 163,850 also have radar coverage as well. Half of the data is from U.S. roads.
If you’re interested in exploring the model, you can download the dataset on Hugging Face and the developer kit on GitHub.
90%: Americans Have Had It With High Car Prices
Photo by: Illustration by Sam Woolley
For nearly half a decade, consumers have been paying the COVID-19 tax on new and used cars. Sticker price? Merely a suggestion as dealers are capitalizing on the “Sure, I’ll pay that!” attitude since 2020.
But Americans have finally had enough of it. The average transaction price of a new car has skyrocketed to around $50,000, while new EVs are hitting a high of $59,125.
Those same dealerships are now noticing it in their sales trends. Analysts are also seeing in car-buying data that cars sit on lots for longer periods of time, and cash-on-the-hood discounts (which seemingly went extinct as the chip shortage started) are even making a comeback. The Wall Street Journal spills what’s on consumers’ minds:
Car buyers are downsizing, buying used vehicles, taking on longer car loans and holding out for deals.
“People are asking, ‘How can I afford this?’” said Robert Peltier, who owns dealerships in East Texas. He said traffic, while still solid, has slowed at his dealerships and more customers are gravitating toward less-costly cars such as the pint-size Chevrolet Trax. “There are people who are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck.”
This is kind of an unexpected, dramatic turn. 2025 was meant to be a victory lap—tax cuts, deregulation and American factories humming with domestic production that pump out affordable, home-grown cars. Basically, another year of people buying anything with four wheels and a made-in-America stamping.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the EV market is facing an anticipated collapse with Q4 being just the start. The loss of the $7,500 EV tax credit seemingly yanked thousands of theoretical sales off the board.
The loss of new car sales isn’t just limited to electric cars, either. Gas cars are also showing signs of a downturn with fewer sales and longer times-to-turn. Some lenders are even easing up on their borrowing requirements, while auto loan defaults are encroaching on levels similar to the 2008 recession.
More from the WSJ:
Signs of strain are beginning to show up in the data. Cars are sitting longer on dealer lots. Dealers are piling on extra discounts to make sales. Lower-income borrowers are defaulting on car loans. Americans as a whole are spending less overall on vehicle purchases than they did a year ago.
“Other components of the economy are tugging on the consumer,” said Ivan Drury, an automotive analyst for the car-shopping website Edmunds.com. […] The cost of car parts and repairs has climbed as well, so hanging on to old vehicles comes with its own costs. “You can’t really find relief,” Drury said.
This leaves American car buyers at an interesting crossroads. Keep an old car on the road while repair costs are soaring, or spend $50,000 on a new crossover?
Dealers know the jig is up. Discounts are rising, negotiations are back and earning your business is once again climbing the priority ladder. Meanwhile, consumers are simply refusing the notion of a $700-per-month car payment. Car buyer fever is breaking.
100%: What’s The Solution To The New-Car Price Blues?
Car Dealer EV Sales Graphic
Photo by: InsideEVs
Lower interest rates? Just cheaper new car options? Getting Americans to downsize? Drop your theories in the comments. More EV News We want your opinion! What would you like to see on Insideevs.com? – The InsideEVs team
